Walking through “Sunset Corridor,” the immersive installation by Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, feels like sneaking onto a film set or being teleported into a role-playing game. Successive galleries resemble a server room, a kitchen, a laboratory, a bachelor pad and a dining car, all of which have been taken over by an underground subculture and used for illicit purposes. There’s an urge to glance over your shoulder in case someone discovers you snooping around.
In this alternate universe, a pharmaceutically enriched youth counterculture takes over and subverts biotechnological innovations developed by corporate America and the military-industrial complex; think of a mash-up of IBM and the CIA, as remixed by the Velvet Underground. Its overall tone, a mix of deadpan humor and obsessive paranoia, calls back to the literary imaginations of Cold War-inflected American novelists like Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace.
Each room is so meticulously outfitted and thoroughly executed that the illusion is quite convincing. Details include largely 1970s-era lab equipment, circuit boards, crystal sculptures, magazine clippings and such, connected by vast amounts of wiring and rubber tubing, as well as double-take-inducing props, such as a laser printer and security sensors molded entirely out of sunflower seeds.
The climax of the show comes in the final gallery, where the artists’ 39-minute pseudo-documentary film Nova Heat screens continuously. As its soothing-sinister voiceover tells a story that ties together many of the clues dropped in the preceding galleries, a soundtrack of drones and pulsing beats lulls the viewer into submission. “Sunset Corridor” is perhaps ideally viewed on the way to or from a rave or electronic-music festival.
Details
“Jonah Freeman + Justin Lowe: Sunset Corridor” is on view at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 3200 Darnell St., Fort Worth, through Jan. 5. Adults $16; seniors, military and first responders $12; students $10; under 18 free; half-price on Sundays, and free on Fridays. For more information, call 817-738-9215 or visit themodern.org.
